Does El Nino Affect Business Cycles

In this paper we test to see if the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon has an influence on national business cycles. If El Niño has any effect at all on business cycles and economic growth, one would expect it, at the very least, to affect small, undiversified economies highly dependent on agriculture and fishing. However, we find that while El Niño exhibits some influence on South Africa, Australia, and perhaps India, there is surprisingly little statistically significant effect on GDP growth or on price inflation in the other countries in our sample. Moreover, we see little significant El Niño effect on agricultural commodity prices.

Book Review: Hsieh Liang-tso and the Analects of Confucius: Humane Learning as a Religious Quest

Hsieh Liang-tso is the first volume to explore Chinese traditions in the Academy Series sponsored by Oxford and the American Academy of Religion. Most previous titles in the series focus on Christianity, which perhaps explains Selover’s attention to the perspectives of comparative religions and comparative theology in his introduction. There he briefly traces the history of the issues concerning the religious dimensions of the Chinese literati tradition and outlines a comparative framework for approaching eleventh-century Chinese thought. Inspired by Robert Neville’s Beyond the Masks of God, Selover focuses in the introduction on four themes—scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. This framework, however, does not figure prominently until the conclusion. [excerpt

How Do The Trans-Pacific Economies Affect the USA? An Industrial Sector Approach

This paper studies how the Trans-Pacific region affects the US economy in terms of business cycle transmission. We use a large data set consisting of disaggregated sectoral industrial production indexes from selected countries in the region and employ a factor-augmented vector autoregression (FAVAR) approach to analyze the transmission of shocks in different industries. We find that a positive output shock in the entire Trans-Pacific region has positive effects on the majority of US manufacturing sectors. We also find that sectoral shocks in five sectors of the Trans-Pacific region have a large impact on the overall US economy. Three of the five sectors displayed strong same-sector responses relative to the overall response, suggesting that vertical production linkages might play a key role in the transmission of shocks. Our results highlight the importance of examining industrial sectors in studying the transmission of shocks in the Trans-Pacific region

Examining Industrial Interdependence Between Japan and South Korea: A FAVAR Approach

This paper investigates the economic relationship between Japan and South Korea by incorporating disaggregated output measures. Using a factor-augmented vector autoregression (FAVAR) model, we conduct several experiments to test the nature of the interdependence, both in the aggregate and by sector. We find that South Korean output shocks affect the Japanese economy in a significant manner, whereas Japanese output shocks have a limited effect on South Korea. By further examining the transmission mechanism of sectoral output shocks and comparing them with the direction of sectoral trade, we find evidence of cross-border production sharing, which explains the asymmetric results seen in the aggregate output

Why Can Weak Linkages Cause International Stock Market Synchronization? The Mode-Locking Effect

This study investigates the synchronization between stock markets in different countries. International stock markets tend to synchronize with one another in what appears to be an international financial cycle, yet trade and capital flows between the stock markets do not appear to be strong enough for one stock market to “drive” fluctuations in another stock market. Why are these weakly linked financial markets synchronized? This study suggests that global stock market synchronization results from a “mode-locking” phenomenon, a nonlinear process in which even a weak coupling between oscillating systems like stock markets tends to synchronize the fluctuations between the systems. Simulations, econometric analysis, and spectral analysis investigate this mode-locking hypothesis. Analysis reveals modest support for the mode-locking hypothesis of international stock market synchronization